In a society where the rights and potential of women are constrained, no man can be truly free. He may have power, but he will not have freedom.

I agree with those who argue that it is possible to distil from the religions of the world their common values and relevance. As far as I'm concerned I am involved in a complementary process with people who have a moral or spiritual commitment to human rights.

There is a democratic deficit. In Latin America in particular there is real concern that democratic governments are not delivering and that is leading to experimenting with different models that are much less democratic. But even in Western Europe the deficit is a problem.

It is people who go through suffering that have an empathy for the suffering of others.

Membership in the European Community, now the European Union, has enabled Ireland to re-find its sense of participation - cultural, political, social - at the European level. I think that also opens up possibilities for Ireland as a European country to look outward - to look particularly, for example, at countries to which a lot of Irish people emigrated, to our links - our human links - with the United States, with Canada, with Australia, with New Zealand. And to look also, because of our history, at our links to the developing countries.

Human rights are inscribed in the hearts of people; they were there long before lawmakers drafted their first proclamation.

I believe we should try to move away from the vocabulary and attitudes which shape the stereotyping of developed and developing country approaches to human rights issues. We are collective custodians of universal human rights standards, and any sense that we fall into camps of "accuser" and "accused" is absolutely corrosive of our joint purposes. The reality is that no group of countries has any grounds for complacency about its own human rights performance and no group of countries does itself justice by automatically slipping into the "victim" mode.